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New Online Resources

Engineering Village is now available from the New York State Library. The State Library’s subscription to Engineering Village includes Compendex, GeoRef, and NTIS. As a New York State government employee, you have free access to these new online resources 24/7 from work or home with your NYSL Borrower's Card.

Engineering Index, the most comprehensive literature index for engineering information, recently ceased being published in print. The State Library transferred its print subscription to Compendex, the online version of Engineering Index. Compendex covers almost every engineering breakthrough and indexes subjects in 190 engineering disciplines, including: agricultural engineering and food technology, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computers and data processing, construction materials, control engineering, electronics and communications, fuel technology, geology, nuclear technology, plant and power engineering, pollution, sanitary engineering and transportation. Compendex includes over 11 million records from 1970 – present.

GeoRef indexes and abstracts environmental geology, economic geology, surficial geology, geophysics, petrology, stratigraphy, and paleontology articles from 1785 to present for North America and 1933 to present for the rest of the world. NTIS indexes and abstracts unclassified US and international government agency reports from 1899 to present.

To use these new online resources you need a NYSL Borrower’s Card and PIN. If you don't have a card send an email to Circ@nysed.gov or call the Circulation Desk at 518-473-7895 to request a Borrower's card application for NYS government employees. If you have questions about these or other online resources available from the NYSL, contact staff at the Reference Desk at 518-474-5355.

Specialized Internet Search Tools

Most people use the same Internet search engine for all their information needs. If you are searching for specific types of information a less generic tool maybe more appropriate and efficient. The following are three specialized search tools to try. If your searching for scientific information try Scirus [note: no longer available, Jan. 31, 2014], a comprehensive science specific Internet search engine that claims to search over 370 million science related pages. Scirus filters out non-scientific sites; finds peer-reviewed articles and searches preprint servers, digital archives, repositories and patent and journal databases. If you like to access e-books try www.Inkmesh.com to locate free ebooks and compare prices on those for sale. You can search by title or author or browse subject categories. When you need resources from reputable sources and want to avoid sites that are questionable or unreliable www.ipl.org is a good choice. The site is maintained by a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science.